Regarding USRP B200

[aryansinha]

Hello everyone ,


I am senior undergraduate student in radio communications engineering. I got a new USRP B200 SDR motherboard from ettus research LLC .

I have to planned it to interface it with MATLAB/Simulink . I have gone through the USRP comm toolbox on mathworks website and installed the required support toolboxes in my PC.

Communications System Toolbox Support Package for USRP Radio Documentation

While going through the different tutorials , I found a QPSK transmitter and receiver tutorial where it was mentioned that I need a daughterbaord to run these codes. upon searching the ettus website , I understood that theya re RF front ends. but my B200 has antenna ports which means that it has inbuilt front end.. Why do i need external RF front end (or) so called daughter boards.


I know this doubt might be a newboie .. But please clarify ...


If anyone has used B200 on MATLAB/Simulink , Please let me know for any short tutorials to get familiar with this SDR so that i can go for GNU radio in my Graduate studies.


Aryan

 

[tay0123]

I have a B200 also that I've played with a bit, but definitely not an expert. Others will know more than I do. I'm kind of a newbie too.

You are correct in that the B200 already has a front end. Daughterboards (RF front ends) were produced for other USRP types but aren't needed/available for the B200. (I think) you already have the hardware you need.

In my experience as a casual user of these devices and reader of these forums.. very few hobbyists, if any, use MATLAB or the like. I think pretty much all of the times I've heard of MATLAB being used for SDR have been in academic environments. I wouldn't discourage you from asking around on these forums, but you'd probably have much better luck emailing the authors of papers you've read for some MATLAB code.

GNU radio tutorials should be available from the GNU radio website/people, I've seen some good manuals and references posted from them. Again, I'm not an expert, doublecheck me here, but I think most of the active development in GNU radio is done in python, don't remember seeing anything in MATLAB.

Hope this helps. If you can already write code in MATLAB, learning python shouldn't be difficult.